Russ

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Weekend Reading 041318: GDPR, and the ever deepening pile of security vulnerabilities

I think we are all hoping that when ICANN meets with the DPAs (Digital Protection Authorities) a clear path forward will be illuminated. We are all hoping that the DPAs will provide definitive guidance regarding ICANN’s interim model and that some special allowance will be made so that registrars and registries are provided with additional time to implement a GDPR-compliant WHOIS solution. —Matt Serlin @CircleID

Security researchers at Embedi have disclosed a critical vulnerability in Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code, take full control over the vulnerable network equipment and intercept traffic. —Swati Khandelwal @The Hacker News

With the growing presence and sophistication of online threats like viruses, ransomware, and phishing scams, it’s increasingly important to have the right protection and tools to help protect your devices, personal information, and files from being compromised. Microsoft already provides robust security for Office services, including link checking and attachment scanning for known viruses and phishing threats, encryption in transit and at rest, as well as powerful antivirus protection with Windows Defender. Today, we’re announcing new advanced protection capabilities coming to Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers to Continue reading

On the ‘web: The Best Decicions

A long time ago, when I worked for a major vendor’s escalation team, I was called into a customer to help them move from one routing protocol to another. We spent some time looking over their network, discussing how best to approach the problems they would probably encounter, how long it would take to make the change, and many other issues involved. Finally, over lunch, I asked why they were planning on changing routing protocols. @ECI

On the ‘web: How to Bridge the Network Skills Gap

The landscape is littered with training for all these new skills, but there is little time, or guidance, through the process of retraining into these new skills. The process of retraining, far too often, feels like leaving all your old skills behind and learning completely new ones. The seeming wide array of paths the average engineer faces, combined with the uncertainty of which of these paths forward represent the real future, can seem overwhelming. @TechTarget

The EIGRP SIA Incident: Positive Feedback Failure in the Wild

Reading a paper to build a research post from (yes, I’ll write about the paper in question in a later post!) jogged my memory about an old case that perfectly illustrated the concept of a positive feedback loop leading to a failure. We describe positive feedback loops in Computer Networking Problems and Solutions, and in Navigating Network Complexity, but clear cut examples are hard to find in the wild. Feedback loops almost always contribute to, rather than independently cause, failures.

Many years ago, in a network far away, I was called into a case because EIGRP was failing to converge. The immediate cause was neighbor flaps, in turn caused by Stuck-In-Active (SIA) events. To resolve the situation, someone in the past had set the SIA timers really high, as in around 30 minutes or so. This is a really bad idea. The SIA timer, in EIGRP, is essentially the amount of time you are willing to allow your network to go unconverged in some specific corner cases before the protocol “does something about it.” An SIA event always represents a situation where “someone didn’t answer my query, which means I cannot stay within the state machine, so I Continue reading

Weekend Reads 040618: Kernel Programming, Secure Messaging, and Icebergs

Programming in user space is safer for a very small number of reasons, not the least of which is the virtual memory system, which tricks programs into believing they have full control over system memory and catches a small number of common C-language programming errors, such as touching a piece of memory that the program has no right to touch. Other reasons include the tried-and-true programming APIs that operating systems have now provided to programs for the past 30 years. All of which means programmers can possibly catch more errors before their code ships, which is great news—old news, but great news. What building code in user space does not do is solve the age-old problems of isolation, composition, and efficiency. —George V. Neville-Neil @ACM

There is no such thing as a perfect or one-size-fits-all messaging app. For users, a messenger that is reasonable for one person could be dangerous for another. And for developers, there is no single correct way to balance security features, usability, and the countless other variables that go into making a high-quality, secure communications tool. @EFF

Breaches of private information in hospital records are serious and expensive security events but remediating them can be deadly. Continue reading

On the ‘net: Openness and Composable Systems

Openness, it seems, is “in the air.” While the Liqid folks were over at OCP, I was over at the Open Networking Summit (ONS), where I (primarily) attended the Linux Foundation (Networking), or LF(N), board meeting. What was interesting at this year’s summit is just how little the focus of open network is on bare metal routers and switches, and how much of the focus is on server-based and overlay networking. @GestaltIT

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